The present invention is directed to magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and, more particularly, to a method and computerized system for increasing the speed of MR image reconstruction in a multi-coil MR data acquisition in a less computationally burdensome manner.
The number of receiver channels of MR systems is steadily increasing to meet the demands of parallel MR imaging techniques. Parallel imaging encompasses a category of imaging techniques often used in MR studies to accelerate data acquisition. This is achieved by sampling an imaging volume with an array of RF receive coils or channels in parallel. As each coil acquires MR signal from each volume element (voxel) of the imaging volume, the sensitivity of each coil to the imaging volume may be exploited to reduce the number of phase encoding steps that are necessary to completely sample the imaging volume field of view (FOV). By reducing the number of phase encoding steps, data acquisition can either be accelerated or, alternatively, more phase encoding steps may be used without increasing scan time to improve resolution.
To decrease scan time or increase resolution, MR scanners are being equipped with more channels. In addition to achieving higher acceleration factors, increasing the number of receive channels also allows for more flexibility in the choice of FOV and/or scan planes. Nonetheless, this redundancy results in an excessive data flow which can burden the reconstruction engine and slow down acquisition without significant benefits as quantified by image signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio.
It would therefore be desirable to have an image reconstruction technique that exploits the benefits of multi-coil, i.e., parallel, acquisition without overburdening the reconstruction engine of an MR scanner.